Reading my way through 2025
My stack of unreads towers over me
If I piled all the unread books in my house in a stack, it would reach to the eight-foot ceiling in my house.
I exaggerate, but not by much.
I have entire shelves in one bookcase devoted to unread books. And many more scattered throughout the house. And yet more on my Kindle.
I have vowed that in 2025, I will not purchase a single additional book - whether hardcover, softcover, OR on Kindle, until I have finished reading the 70 unread books I counted on my shelves. Those of you who know my personally are probably chuckling at that thought.
To even have a PRAYER of accomplishing the lofty goal of reading my 70 unread books, I have made a second vow: I will not enter another bookstore in 2025, until the goal is met. Lord help me, I’m not sure how I can do this. This may be harder than my weight loss journey.
Here’s the list of those books, in case you are curious:
The List:
Fiction
Phantastes - George McDonald
Tweed Tales - Jim Collins
Atonement - Ian McEwen
Unfinished Tales - J. R. R. Tolkien
A Wonder Book - Nathaniel Hawthorne
Southern Bound - John S. Sledge
Green Mansions - W. H. Hudson
The Aenid - Virgil; translated by C. Day Lewis
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
The Pilgrim’s Progress - John Bunyan
The Works of Saki - H. H. Munro
She Stoops to Conquer - Oliver Goldsmith
Robinson Crusoe - Defoe
Twain’s End - Lynn Cullen
Lost in the Cosmos - Walker Percy
Rooms of their Own - Alex Johnson
The Measure of Her Powers - M.F.K. Fisher
The Yearling - Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
December’s Thorn - Phillip DePoy
Purgatory - Dante
Rhetoric - Aristotle
The Taming of the Shrew - Shakespeare
The Tell Tale Heart and Other Writings - Edgar Allen Poe
The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Distance Home - Paula Sanders
A Passage to India - E.M. Forster
The World’s Largest Man - Harrison Scott Key
The Iliad - Homer
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
Rootabaga Stories - Carl Sandburg
The Dark Tower - C.S. Lewis
One Foot in Eden - Ron Rash
Christmas at Sea Pines Cottage - Sally Smith O’Rourke
Household Gods - Judith Tarr and Harry Turtledove
Downtown - Ferrol Sams
A Rule of Life - Patricia Brandon
Rise of the Pale Moon - Patricia Brandon
Non-fiction
The Pyramids - Miroslav Verner
The Unknown Warriors - Nicholas Pringle
Lost Flowers - Perry D. Sullivan
The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle - Jane Leavy
About My Mother - Peggy Rowe
The Gifts of the Jews - Thomas Cahill
The Fight for Jerusalem - Dore Gold
The Forgotten Man - Amity Schaes
A Preface to Paradise Lost - C.S. Lewis
How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big - Scott Adams
Irreversible Damage - Abigail Shrier
The Origins of the Second World War - A.J.P. Taylor
Distilled Genius - Susan Branch
The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger - Marc Levinson
The Third Horseman - William Rosen
The Remedy - Thomas Goetze
Big Russ and Me - Tim Russert
When Money Dies - Adam Ferguson
Ordinary Men - Christopher Brown
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks - Rebecca Skloot
Walking the Bible - Bruce Feiler
Moral Man and Immoral Society - Reinhold Niebuhr
The New Lifetime Reading Plan1
My Bookstore - Ronald Rice
Wicked Columbia - Alexia Jones Helsley
The Song of Annie Moses - Robin Donica Wolaver
The Road to Serfdom - F.A. Hayek
The Catalog of Shipwrecked Books - Edward Wilson-Lee
The Sisters of Sinai -
On Stories - C.S. Lewis
Left of Bang - Van Horne
The Biology of Belief - Bruce H. Lipton
In A Walled Garden - Bessie Belloc
By the time I’m done with this I won’t need another lifetime reading plan. Not sure if I won’t lose my taste for reading!